The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
REMEMBERING JANET KITZ
A TRIBUTE BY DAN SOUCOUP
With the passing of Janet Kitz in May of this year, it seems appropriate to reflect back on her marvelous career as a researcher and historical author. Less than a decade after arriving in Halifax in the early 1970s, Janet encountered a number of old mortuary bags belonging to victims and survivors of the Halifax Explosion in the bottom of Province House. After researching the largely forgotten items, Janet began to interview survivors and their families, piecing together their astonishing stories of suffering and survival in the days after December 6, 1917.
In 1989 Nimbus published Shattered City: The Halifax Explosion and the Road to Recovery. It was the first new book on the explosion in over a decade — in fact all books on the explosion before Shattered City were essentially accounts based on newspaper coverage in 1917. Janet would go on to publish
Survivors, Children of the Halifax Explosion, and along with coauthor Joan Payzant, December 1917: Re-Visiting the Halifax
Explosion. But Shattered City quickly became the definitive book on the explosion. And the book soon became a critical success as well as a bestseller, mainly due to the large amount of new information—previously unknown stories, interviews, letters, and photographs acquired by the author.
We at Nimbus knew the book could be successful but the night of the launch at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, Halifax came out in droves to hear Janet speak. The museum was overwhelmed with families of many of the victims and survivors, ordinary people that Janet had sought out and interviewed for the book. We soon ran out of books after selling well in excess of 300 copies—even selling a box out of the nearby Book Room’s wholesale supply. And to this day, despite many new books being successfully published each year, Shattered City has retained the record for selling the most number of copies at a book launch in Nova Scotia. Janet Kitz was a remarkable Nova Scotian and her research and writing created a renaissance of historical interest in the Halifax Explosion that even today, thirty years after it was originally published, shows no signs of abating.
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